Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be converting this blog to WordPress.

I know that for some of you in the b2evolution community, this will be a bit of a let down, but having taken some time to evaluate the program, I think it’ll be much better for my particular blogging needs. There are a bunch of features in Wordpress that I’ve been meaning to hack/plugin into b2evolution, and this will mean that I won’t have to do that. (Which is good, since I really don’t have the time.)

I don’t want this to sound like I’m dogging on b2evolution - if you can benefit from having multiple blogs and languages, then it’s the ideal system for you. The next major release promises some really cool stuff, as well, particularly for sites that have many users and blogs running at once. Multiple sub-domains will be supported, in addition to baysian antispam features, a really nice file manager, and a whole new renovated plugin architecture.

…however…

I really don’t need most of those things, and the new plugin architecture, while cool and definitely a huge improvement, will mean that I’ll have to re-create all my hacks if I want to use them, and I’m not really that big on extra coding these days. (That itch gets scratched raw by my day job.) The only thing keeping me with b2evolution is that I like the people who use it, and I’ve enjoyed playing with it, but it’s just not as good for what I want to do with this website.

I’m not sure exactly when the switch will be, but I’m going to be doing my best to make sure that my permalinks all stay permanent, and that the new site is just as functional as this one. Part of that means tweaking the b2evo-wp importer script, working around some funky issues with mod_rewrite greediness on Apache 1.3.33, and twist the template a bit to keep the nice linkblog the way that I have it right now.

Of course, I’m not planning on abandoning the b2evo community entirely. I’ll still be happy to answer b2evo questions or lend a hand with funky problems when I’ve got the time.

5 Responses to “It’s been fun…”

I’ve just read that you have problems setting up SSH for Sourceforge CVS. It’s really no issue. You do it once and benefit for the rest of your life, because you’ve learnt to use SSH to tunnel CVS/SVN.

I’ve often wondered, reading about your “hacks”, why you do not commit/integrate them to CVS/HEAD. IIRC you have even committed to CVS actually some time ago, haven’t you?

I got over the whole SSH/CVS thing, and wrote a tutorial for windows users on the subject, so that the steps would all be in a single place. (The problem wasn’t any particular difficulty in the process, just that all the steps aren’t in a single place, and I hadn’t had time until fairly recently to research and play around with it enough to make it work.)

In the process of figuring that out, I did commit to the b2evo CVS repository once, just to fix some misspellings and to test it out.

There are a few reasons why I didn’t commit my hacks into b2evolution. For the most part, the hacks that I’ve applied to b2evo are for my own benefit. Sometimes, when I see that something could be helpful to others (or if people ask for it, and I feel like figuring it out) I’ll write up how I did it. However, this blog isn’t my source of income, and there are a lot of other things that take up my time. As a result, I usually do hacks and stuff for this site “just good enough to get by.” The added trouble of packaging it up, adding options to the backoffice, and making the whole implementation generalized and user-friendly enough for the average user is simply more than I have time for at this point.

By going to WordPress, I lose out on quite a few features that b2evo has, some of which I like (like multiple blogs and built-in antispam/stats, in particular), but most of which I never use (like localization, multi-user functions, etc.) And what I gain is very good for me: Pages, A HUGE selection of plugins (including some very full-featured stats/antispam features), Clean URLs out-of-the-box on *every* user-visible page (something I’m really all about)

Dang. I’m really sorry to hear this. You’ve come up with a lot of great improvements for b2evolution (I came to your site just now so I could link to one of them). But if Wordpress works better for you, then that’s what you should use. Surely you’ll try the new version when it comes out. Maybe it will win you over.

Isaac - Your blog was one of the first b2evo blogs I stumbled upon that got me to convert from the old b2 codebase. I’ve followed your contributions to b2evo and then added some of my own. I’m with you on several of your notions to switch in addition to the fact that I don’t think the direction the project is headed will prove successful, not to mention the tone the core dev team has taken.

I however will be rolling my own…currently writing a completely custom solution in (gasp) c# and MS SQL. It’s what I now do for a living (c# dev), so I’m able to hijack a lot of data access layer and object base/ object state collection architecture that will streamline the whole process and make it a truly OO application to the fullest extent. I’ve grown tired of php when I actually got some professional level programming experience….it seems more like child’s play than developement. /end rant.

Anywho, glad to see you with sound direction. I used to take it semi-personal when people would switch, but now I don’t much care. I’ve pretty much given up on releasing any more of my existing mods to the b2evo community…there’s just something I can’t seem to identify that sours me.

I do want to make it clear that I haven’t left out of any dissatisfaction with the b2evolution community. I really have enjoyed solving the problems that we solved, and the people associated with the project seem like a really great bunch of guys. I’ve learned a lot from several of them.

However, WordPress is just a better program for me. It’s much smaller, much more extensible. While there are a far fewer features out-of-the-box than b2evo, the plugin architecture makes it possible to pick and choose the features that I want. For example, there is no stats system included in WordPress. However, there are several stats plugins, some of which aren’t as good as b2evo’s stats system, but some of which are actually better for my needs.

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